Tag: social media
United Kingdom Considers New Laws: Age Restrictions for Facebook Likes, Snapstreaks
The recent call for age restrictions on likes and streaks on Facebook and Snapchat is long overdue, but does not go far enough. People of all ages should be protected from the psychological damage caused by likes, streaks and other online ‘reward’ mechanisms used by giant social media companies to make us all addicts. Likes, ...
Automation and the Classic Political Response – Retrain Workers – Inadequate
When the threat of automation is raised, politicians tend to respond with banal platitudes about retraining workers. "We need to train people for the jobs of the future," they'll say. When asked what those jobs will be, they inevitably say: coding. But what if there are no jobs? And what if we can't all be ...
The Prison of New Technology
There is a line in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death that has been haunting me for months now. It reads in part: “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” The idea is counter-cultural. We believe, intrinsically, that new technologies empower us to think. The ...
